Abstract:

Aquisition of efficient reading skills in a foreign language is a key component of the professional competence for all professionals of the 21st century.The article proposes a series of online activities that can be integrated into the LMS MOODLE in order to improve reading skills in English as a foreign language amongst university students. First, the article discusses three groups of factors (text-related; reading environment-related; reader-related) affecting the speed of reading and the quality of reading comprehension both in the native language and in English as a foreign language, emphasises contributors to fast reading in a foreign language, in particular. Secondly, a list of skills distinguishing a good reader from a poor one is given. Finaly, we propose three blocks of reading activities that can be embedded into the LMS MOODLE: the first block comprises activities designed to enhance the student's language competence (speed of recognizing and comprehending foreign words, grammar and syntactics); the second block is aimed at the development of skills of a good reader. The focus here is on reading strategies and compensatory skills. Lastly, the third block involves further advancement of reading comprehension and critical thinking reading skiils and integration of knowledge into the conceptual picture of the world. The instruction is aimed at extracting information on three levels, i.e. of the text, subtext, implicit and unspoken information.

Keywords:

Information technology, education, efficient reading, reading comprehension, Moodle, foreign language teaching.